


Burned

by adrianna_m_scovill



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 13:11:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17829176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adrianna_m_scovill/pseuds/adrianna_m_scovill
Summary: This wasn't supposed to be so angsty and I apologize. Last week's episode of SVU, when Benson was talking to Rollins about her ordeal with William Lewis (assuming that's who/what she was talking about), sort of messed with my head a bit.This doesn't go into graphic details of what did or didn't happen, but it could still be potentially triggering because of the emotional aspect.





	Burned

Benson opened the door, and Barba’s gaze skated quickly down her body, taking in the short shorts and white tank top and a whole lot of skin. His mouth immediately went dry, but he returned his eyes to hers quickly and managed to curve his lips into a smile.

She smiled, too, but it was a tired gesture that didn’t fully reach her eyes. “Barba,” she said quietly.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said, refusing to let himself fidget. “I hope I’m not interrupting—are you and Noah having dinner?” he asked, glancing past her into the apartment.

“Noah’s not here,” she answered. “He’s staying the night with Rollins.” She looked at the bottle of wine in his hands. “Did you bring that for him?”

He offered a chuckle, hating how nervous it sounded. He knew she wouldn’t laugh at him; she understood loneliness, too, he supposed—even though she had a kid, now. It wasn’t the kind of thing a person forgot, that aching desire to see a friendly face instead of the same apartment wall or a stranger in a bar.

“It was a gift,” he said, holding the bottle up so they could both look at it. “It’s expensive. The kind of expensive that’s a shame to drink alone,” he added with a crooked smile that he hoped didn’t show too much of his desperation.

She pushed the door wider and stepped aside. “You can come in, but I’m not putting on anything more decent,” she said, turning away from him to head toward the kitchen.

“It’s…decent,” he said, and she laughed quietly. He walked inside and closed the door. Her hair was up in a loose, messy bun, and he could see the painful-looking sunburn high on her back, above the curved neckline of her tank, and across her shoulders and the backs of her arms and legs. He winced at the sight. “I’m guessing you already know this by the way you’re moving, but your back is…uh…”

“Red as a lobster?” she suggested. “Yeah. That’s Rollins’s fault. She let me fall asleep at the beach.” She reached into the cupboard carefully, pulling down two glasses. “In her defense, she was taking care of all three kids so I could relax. But still.” She turned and set the glasses on the counter, offering him a tight smile as he crossed slowly toward her. “Anyway, I skipped dinner so I probably shouldn’t drink much, but a little company might be nice.”

“Might be,” he agreed. They regarded each other in silence for a few moments. The mood felt heavy, somber; he hadn’t meant to make it that way, hadn’t wanted to bring his own disquiet into her evening, but he realized that her mood had preceded his knock at her door. She seemed subdued, her brightness dulled. Maybe it was the pain of the sunburn, maybe she was simply tired, but he had a feeling it was more. “Do you want me to fix you something to eat?” he asked, pointing at the refrigerator as he set the bottle beside the glasses.

Her smile was more genuine, now, and there was a hint of sparkle in her eyes. “Thank you, no,” she said, and he couldn’t help but smile in return. “I’m not hungry.”

“Sun poisoning will do that to you,” he said, holding out a hand for the corkscrew she’d pulled from a drawer. “It’s still cold. We can throw it in the freezer, though—”

“I’m sure it’s fine. Do you want something else? Cheese? Chocolate?”

“I suppose I should’ve thought to bring something more than just alcohol,” he said, offering another lopsided smile as he popped the cork from the bottle.

“You brought you,” she answered, and he felt a pleasant flutter in his stomach. She sighed and rolled her shoulders with a wince. “Although I’m not sure I’m the best company tonight.”

“Do you want me to get you something? For pain, or—”

She held up the glass of wine he’d just poured. “That’s what this is for,” she said, taking a tentative sip.

“Well?” he asked. “What’s the verdict? Does it taste expensive?”

Her eyes crinkled over the rim of her glass as she took another small drink. As he raised his own glass to his lips, she said, “It’s good. Really good. Was this a gift, or a bribe?”

“Hmm,” he said, taking a moment to savor the flavor on his tongue. “It only counts as a bribe if I give them something in return.”

She smiled, shaking her head, and pointed a finger toward the living room, raising her eyebrows. He nodded, and trailed along behind her as she made her way in to the couch. He carried the bottle in one hand, his glass in the other. She was right, the wine was good, but he was going to have to be careful. It would be easy to drink too much, to overstay his welcome, to force his misery onto her.

It had been a year and a half since his trial, since he’d left his job with the Manhattan DA and SVU, and he missed it—all of it. But he missed her most of all. They still saw each other. She still smiled if he showed up at her door with a bottle of wine. She still smiled when they met for a rare drink at Forlini’s. She still smiled when their paths crossed professionally.

But it wasn’t the same.

He’d known what he was giving up: a fantasy. A fantasy he’d never deserved to entertain, and one he’d destroyed once and for all by walking away from her after she’d stood by him through the worst days of his life. But he seemed incapable of letting go completely, and that wasn’t fair to her. He told himself that he was simply making an effort to maintain their friendship because cutting her out completely would hurt her, but that was one of those dangerous lies that tended to grow teeth and bite the hand of the feeder in the darkest hours of the night.

She grimaced as she lowered herself carefully to the sofa. She sat perched near the edge so her back wouldn’t touch the cushions, but he knew the backs of her thighs must feel painfully raw against the fabric, too. He sat beside her, but not too near, afraid of jostling her. He put the bottle on the table and sipped at his wine. He could feel her regarding him and after a moment he turned his head to look at her. She gave him a small, tired smile.

“I miss you stopping by,” she said. She spoke softly, but the words hit him hard. He wasn’t expecting the admission, and his defenses weren’t prepared for the rush of emotion it brought.

“Me, too,” he answered before he could strangle the words. “I…you know…”

“Have responsibilities?” she suggested, still smiling.

He shook his head, opened his mouth, and faltered over the words he wanted to say. He looked at the coffee table because he knew she could read his eyes, and his gaze landed on the aloe lotion. He pointed at it. “You want help with that?” he asked. As soon as he heard the words leave his lips, he wanted to pull them back.

She took a drink of wine. Swallowed. And surprised him again: “That would be nice, actually. If you don’t mind.”

He ran his tongue over his lip, nervously, and drank to counteract the dryness in his mouth. “Of course,” he answered. He set his glass on the table and picked up the lotion. He wasn’t sure what she wanted, exactly; her shoulders and upper back looked painfully dark and inflamed, but she could reach those areas herself.

She wasn’t wearing a bra under her tank top.

She set her glass beside his on the table and turned away from him, wincing at the drag of the couch against her burned thighs. He squirted lotion into his palm and put the bottle between his knees.

While he waited for the cream to warm to his skin, he said, “How many days were you sleeping on the beach?” It was a bad joke, awkward and desperate, but she laughed quietly in response.

“We spent most of the day there. I’m the only one who burned, luckily.”

“Not luckily for you,” he countered. She didn’t answer. “Shoulders?” he asked, and she nodded once in consent. He touched his hand to her skin carefully, afraid of hurting her. He could feel her heat, nearly hot enough to burn his palm. He worked the aloe into her shoulder slowly, gently, using the fingers of his other hand to shift aside the strap of her tank top so he could apply lotion to the narrow strip of skin beneath.

“Noah misses you,” she said.

“Yeah, I miss him, too. Maybe I’ll…”

“You can come by for dinner on Wednesday, if you want.”

“Is it still spaghetti night?” he asked as he worked lotion into her burned skin at the base of her neck, pulling aside loose tendrils of hair with his other hand.

“Always.”

“That sounds nice.” He hesitated as he added fresh lotion to his hand. “Maybe…um…”

“If you can’t make it, it’s fine.”

“No, I will. I’d like to. I was going to say maybe…we could have dinner on another night, too. At Forlini’s, maybe, like…”

“Old times?” she suggested.

“Right,” he answered. He expected a refusal. He deserved a refusal.

“Do you like the new job?” she asked instead. It wasn’t exactly new anymore, but they hadn’t talked much about it.

He frowned, applying lotion under the other strap of her shirt. “It’s different,” he said. “But…important, too.”

“Of course.”

“I feel like I’m making a difference. Still, I mean.”

“Of course you are. You always will. I’ve…” She stopped, and he waited as she seemed to search for what she wanted to say. “I’ve been thinking about moving on, myself,” she finally said. “Although to be honest I don’t know where I’d go, what I’d do. I don’t know who I am without SVU, but…” She shrugged a shoulder against his stalled fingers.

“You’ll change the world for the better wherever _you_ are,” he said, but his heart was slamming in his chest. “Did something happen?” he asked.

She sighed, and it was a tired sound that added a fresh crack to his broken heart. “I used to be confident. Overly confident. I knew I wasn’t perfect but I thought I at least knew what I was doing, that I was making a difference. But I’m a fraud. I preach, don’t I? I tell people what they should or shouldn’t do, I did it to you, I drove you away.”

“No.”

“You were the best and I still made you doubt yourself, like I knew better, like I had any right.”

“Liv, you didn’t—you made me better, you—”

“Pushed you away.”

“It’s not what you think. You…you’re like the sun. You…give us warmth and light and hope and you keep us centered. And me, I’m…” He considered, and his lips twisted into a wry little smile. “I’m the idiot Icarus who wanted to touch something I had no right to touch.”

She was silent for several seconds. “The sun destroyed Icarus,” she finally muttered.

“No— _no_ , he was destroyed by his own stupidity and hubris. Anyway, I wasn’t destroyed. To be honest, I needed my wings to be melted. I deserved to fall. But you weren’t the one who did it, I did it to myself. And now I’m…”

“Miserable.”

He closed his eyes. “I’m figuring out where I belong.”

“You belong at SVU,” she said, with an absolute conviction that hit him like a dagger to the heart. “More than I do.”

“Bullshit,” he blurted. “Nobody in the world could do what you do. If you want to leave, that’s your choice. You deserve to be happy. But—”

“Can you do the rest of my back?”

He stilled, his stomach fluttering nervously. He’d had no real plans for the evening aside from hopefully dulling the ache of loneliness for an hour, but she’d been throwing him for a loop at every turn since opening the door. “Sure,” he heard himself say, and she reached back by her sides, carefully pulling up the back of her tank top to reveal the sunburn in the shape of the deep swoop of her swimsuit.

The burn made her scars even more visible; they stood out in stark contrast, glaring at him, twisting his stomach as he tried not to think of the pain embedded in every mark. He’d seen photos of some of them—they’d been fresh wounds, then, and each one had left a scar inside of him, but seeing them now, after all this time, was somehow worse. Years had passed, and she still had to see these reminders in the mirror. She might not see the ones he was looking at, not every day, but he knew that there were others that she _could_ see easily.

He also knew that the existence of these scars affected her life, informing everything from intimate moments to what should be casual wardrobe choices. It must have been a difficult decision for her to even lie on the beach without a shirt covering the marks, and those were not things she should have to worry about. She was beautiful, achingly beautiful, and he’d seen firsthand how her clothing choices, how her _confidence_ , had changed in the wake of her attack.

She couldn’t pull the shirt all the way up, so he pinched it between his fingers and carefully drew it up between her shoulder blades. She held the front in place, keeping her breasts covered while he exposed her back. He spread lotion over the burned expanse of skin, skating carefully over the redness, hoping his palm wasn’t rough or callused.

“You didn’t deserve to fall,” she said quietly. “And you have less _hubris_ than you’d like people to think.”

“Hmm,” he answered, because he needed a moment to think of something to say. “You know…they say when you fall, it’s best to fall straight to the bottom because the further you have to crawl back up, the stronger you’ll be. And it felt like I hit bottom when my own mother wouldn’t talk to me, and—” He was alarmed to hear the crack in his voice, and he paused, composing himself. “And everything in my life was suddenly…broken. But I don’t feel stronger. Maybe because I haven’t tried to climb back up,” he admitted, surprising himself. “I’ve just been…wallowing.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more to help you.”

“You did everything for me. You were my friend, no matter what.”

She didn’t answer, and he added more lotion to her back, letting her skin scorch him. He catalogued the marks: round cigarette burns, straight cuts and jagged lines…

He ran his finger, his touch feather-light, along the length of the longest scar on her back. He didn’t realize what he was doing until her breath hitched in her chest, and he drew his hands back as though she’d slapped him. “Shit,” he said as the shirt slipped partway down her back. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright.”

“No, it’s not,” he answered, cursing himself. “I’m—”

She looked over her shoulder at him, and the words died on his tongue. “It’s alright,” she repeated, barely above a whisper. “They don’t hurt anymore, not the ones you can see.”

_Not the ones you can see_ , he thought, his stomach clenching.

She seemed to realize she’d said more than she intended, and she added quickly, turning her face away from him, “Besides, I can’t see the ones back there, not without trying. I barely remember where they are.”

“You knew,” he said, before he could stop himself. His voice was low, and filled with a pain that was solely for her. He wanted to soak up all of her hurt like a sponge, cleanse her of every moment of suffering. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t take away her pain, he couldn’t help her heal. He couldn’t offer her anything, not him, not a middle-aged man who couldn’t stand the loneliness of his own apartment. “You knew what I was touching. We don’t have to see them to feel them, we don’t forget—” He forced himself to stop talking, and he closed his eyes. “Anyway, I’m sorry, I had no right,” he finally said.

When he opened his eyes, she was looking back at him again. He swallowed past the lump in his throat. He had his hands curled upward on his thighs, afraid to touch her again, afraid he’d crossed a line.

“It took some getting used to,” she admitted quietly, “the idea that people would see them, that people would…pity me, even without understanding where or how—”

“It’s not pity I feel, Liv,” he interrupted. “Maybe…hell, maybe everything _but_ that, you know? Anger, sadness, guilt—” He saw her expression tighten, and he touched his fingers to her shoulder without thinking. “I know, but I _do_ feel guilty. I know I can’t change things, and _my guilt_ is not your burden. You don’t have to protect me from it.” He saw something in her eyes, something that told him he’d hit very close to the mark. “But I could never pity you,” he added. “Not me.”

“No, not you,” she whispered, and his heart stumbled in his chest as she searched his face. The softness, the open vulnerability, in her eyes was almost his undoing. She turned away again. “Anyway, it’s taken some time to accept it, but the scars are part of _me_ , not him.” He felt her exhale and realized his fingers were still on her shoulder. He didn’t draw them back and she didn’t pull away.

“Do you want me to…keep going?” he asked after a moment.

“Yes. Please,” she said. “It does help.”

He nodded even though she wasn’t looking at him, and then he did take his hand from her shoulder to add more lotion to his palm. He pulled her shirt up again. “I meant you can talk to me,” he said after a minute of silence broken only by their soft breaths. “When I said you don’t have to protect me. I wasn’t there with you, Liv, and I wish to God I had been, that if I couldn’t stop it then at least I could be there for you, but…I can’t take it away. But I’m here now, or whenever.”

“Maybe you were there, you, all the people I love, everyone I knew was looking, praying for me, everyone I wanted so _desperately_ to see again.” Her voice was rough with unshed tears. She paused, and the silence seemed to stretch as he massaged the lotion into her hot skin. “The people that made me want to keep fighting when I wanted to give up.”

“I don’t know what I would’ve done if—” He cut himself off, giving his head a little shake to dislodge those fears that still plagued him. “If we’d lost you,” he said after a few moments. Then, quieter, “If I’d lost you.” _Did I?_ he thought, but he was too much of a coward to ask the question aloud.

“I’m right here,” she answered, but there was no conviction in her voice, now. She shifted, her sunburned skin sliding against his palm. “Do you mind doing my legs?” she asked.

She could do them herself, and they both knew it. He didn’t know what she wanted from him, what her goal was, but he couldn’t refuse her. “If you want,” he said. He pulled her shirt down over her lotioned back and got to his feet with the bottle in his hand. She didn’t look at him as she half-rose and shifted, lowering herself onto her stomach on the sofa. She stretched her legs out and laid her cheek against her bent arm. Her shorts pulled up high on her thighs, showing the edge of her sunburn, and he realized she’d been wearing these shorts—or a similar pair—over her swimsuit.

He sat on the very edge of the sofa, beside her knee. He picked up his glass and swallowed half of the remaining wine.

“If this makes you uncomfortable,” she said.

“No, I’m only afraid of hurting you,” he answered. “Your shoulders are probably going to peel,” he added. “Hopefully the aloe helps.” He smoothed lotion over the back of one reddened thigh, doing his best to ignore all the thoughts and feelings he had no business entertaining.

She turned her face into the crook of her arm as he carefully massaged the aloe into her sunburn. “Maybe I’d just follow you,” she murmured, barely audible. “If I left SVU, I mean. Wouldn’t that be pathetic?”

He didn’t want to acknowledge the sting in his eyes. He didn’t know what to say. He’d never been good at comforting people, and he had no right to give her career advice. “There’s a reason I haven’t gone far,” he muttered. “If either of us is pathetic, it’s—” He stopped. His fingers were at the edge of the shorts, inadvertently nudging them higher, and he caught sight of the curved scar that disappeared toward her inner thigh, barely visible.

His vision blurred, and for several seconds he could hear nothing but the roar of blood in his ears. He let out a shaky breath and blinked the fog from his eyes, but he couldn’t calm the acid roiling in his stomach. He ran the pad of his thumb along the bite mark, trying not to think of how much force it would take to bite someone hard enough to leave a scar all these years later.

She rolled away abruptly, and he dropped his hand onto his own leg. He wanted to apologize but he couldn’t control his throat. She met his eyes for only a moment, and then she pushed her knees against him, pushed him off the edge of the sofa, and he stood as she swung her legs around. She sat on the couch, wrapping her arms over her stomach. She stared at her wine glass but didn’t reach for it.

Barba hesitated, standing awkwardly beside her. “Do you want me to leave?” he finally asked.

She shook her head without looking up at him.

He set down the lotion and wiped his hand on his jeans.

“That’ll stain,” she said.

“I don’t care.” After another few moments, he cautiously sat beside her. _I’m no good at this_ , he thought. “Can I get you something?” he asked.

“There are things I should be able to say to myself. You know?” She chewed her lip for a moment, struggling to keep her composure. Her voice was raw, uneven, when she continued: “I know the words. I know them. I carry them inside of me, but…they don’t have the power they should. I guess, maybe we just need to hear them from someone else,” she said, her voice wavering and almost disappearing on the last two words. Tears slipped from her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She shook her head, rolling her eyes upward as she tried to fight back her emotion. “I should know better.”

“Liv,” he said, and he had to repeat her name because it broke in his throat. “Liv,” he tried again, “please, please tell me what to say.”

She shook her head again and more tears fell from her eyes. She looked at him. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “That’s just it—they’re just words. They don’t mean anything.”

_That’s not true_ , he thought. And then, with a painful desperation: _Words are all I have_. “Words have power, we both know it,” he said, wondering dully if he was only trying to convince himself. “Words can end lives, and they can save lives.”

She smiled, but there was no humor in the curve of her lips. “Words can destroy us,” she said. “Even the ones we don’t say.” She looked away from him, and he felt fear settling into his stomach. “Some secrets…” She closed her eyes and drew a wet, shaky breath through her nose. “Some lies should be taken to the grave.”

The fear was spreading through him, now, and it was cold.

“You’re a good man, Rafael,” she said. “And I knew that you—” She caught a sob in her throat and swallowed it, nearly choking as she struggled to get the rest of the words out: “—would do anything to try to protect me.”

He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t. The blood was roaring in his ears, and his chest was on fire; he couldn’t draw a breath.

“I tried to tell myself that I was protecting you from the truth, not just you but all of my friends, but especially you, especially you,” she said, and she was crying in earnest, now. So was he; he could feel the sheen of tears on his face, but in an abstract sort of way. His hands were trembling as he fought his urge to reach for her, to try to comfort her. “Because you felt guilty even though it wasn’t your fault, and I thought if I let you see how bad it really was, you would only feel worse. But I wasn’t _really_ trying to protect you. I was protecting myself. Because I couldn’t stand to see the _look_ in people’s eyes—I know that look, I’ve seen it a thousand times, I’ve given it to people myself, and…and I didn’t want to admit that I let it happen to _me_ , what right do I have to say anything to anyone—”

“Liv,” he breathed, reaching for her arm. She pulled away from his touch and he drew his hand back. “Jesus Christ, Olivia, you said he didn’t—”

“ _I know what I said_.” Her eyes flashed, and she swiped angrily at the tears on her face. “Don’t you get it? That’s _the thing_. I let him take everything away from me. Everything. Even you.”

“What—”

“I _lied to you, Barba_ ,” she said, and he knew that she was using the anger as defense, trying to stack the fallen bricks back around her heart, but it was too late. There was no going back. “It’s just a _detail_ , a stupid distinction that doesn’t _mean_ anything. I lied to you when I pretended it mattered that he hadn’t crossed some imaginary line. That I was _okay_ because he hadn’t done _one thing_. It didn’t matter. And I didn’t do it to protect you, that was a lie I told myself. I did it because I was weak and he broke me. He _broke me_ ,” she repeated, her voice cracking.

He searched for the right words, fumbling through the fog of fear and pain and guilt and anger, trying desperately to figure out what _she_ would say if their roles were reversed. “You did what you had to do to survive,” he said, and her eyes widened. “You’re not broken. You’re going to be okay, Olivia, I swear it with every piece of myself. You survived. _You_ survived. He’s dead and you’re sitting here and you’re going to be alright.”

For several seconds, she didn’t react, and he was afraid he’d said the wrong thing, that she was going to pull away, push him away. Then she reached out and grabbed his wrist, and her face crumpled. A broken sob escaped her throat and she shook her head.

“Liv,” he said, and she leaned toward him. He put his arm around her as her forehead hit his shoulder, and then she let go of his wrist and grabbed onto the front of his shirt. He put his other arm around her. He could feel the heat of her sunburn through the cotton of her tank top, and he wanted to be gentle, but he could also feel the tremors passing through her as she tried in vain to control the sobs bubbling out of her and he wanted to squeeze her, to wrap her up in himself until she was safe, protected from the world.

“Rafa, please,” she said, clutching desperately at his shirt.

He couldn’t see her face, and he didn’t know what she was asking for—he didn’t even know if _she_ knew—so he did the only thing he could. He held onto her, and he put his lips near her ear so she could hear him, and he said, “You’re strong, you’re alive, you’re here, you’re going to be fine. He didn’t win. You did what had to be done and you survived.”

“I don’t—feel like—I survived,” she admitted raggedly. “I lost—who I am.”

“You didn’t. You’re Olivia Benson. You’re Noah’s mother. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, the person I love more—more than anything in the world. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met but you don’t owe anyone _anything_ , and being hurt doesn’t make you weak. You comfort and protect everyone else. I wish…I wish I could offer you those, you deserve them more than anyone.”

“All I want from you is you,” she said against his tear-soaked shirt.

His arms tightened reflexively. “I’m here,” he murmured into her hair. “And Liv, you are not a fraud. Your pain is exactly what makes you so good at comforting people, understanding them and what they need.” He felt her body tense and realized he was hurting her, and he loosened his grip. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Please don’t let go,” she begged.

“No, I’m not, I won’t,” he said.

She shifted, turning, and put her legs over his. She let go of his shirt and wrapped her arms around his body, keeping her face against his shirt. She wasn’t quite sitting on his lap, but she was close; she was clearly desperate for contact. He held her while she cried. He smoothed his hand over her hair because he was afraid to rub her back. He whispered words of love and encouragement, barely hearing them as they flowed from his lips.

She’d been carrying this grief inside of her for _years_ , and during that time she’d continued to be everything for everyone, denying her own need for comfort and reassurance. And she thought she was weak because she’d become a victim? A liar because she’d offered comfort to others that she couldn’t give to herself?

“I’m so sorry, Liv,” he murmured into her hair when she’d begun to breathe normally.

“No pity,” she mumbled.

“No,” he agreed. His eyes were swollen, his throat thick with grief. “I’m sorry you felt alone. How long have you been thinking about leaving SVU?”

“Since you left,” she admitted. He closed his eyes. “When I thought I was going to lose you, that you might go to prison—I panicked. But then you left anyway, and I…I didn’t realize how much I needed you. To do my job, I mean. I felt like I could do anything, overcome anything, when you were beside me, but when you were gone…”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

She shook her head, but still didn’t look up at him. “It wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault. You need to stop blaming yourself.”

“You need to stop blaming _your_ self,” he countered gently. “You didn’t _let yourself_ become a victim, Liv, and you know that, down inside of yourself. We’ve judged victims, sometimes. You have, I have. We don’t mean to, but we catch ourselves thinking _why didn’t you do this_ or _what were you thinking_ , but we’re wrong when we think it. All of your feelings are valid. You fought for your life and you won. You survived. There’s no wrong way to process that trauma.”

“I put too much pressure on you.”

“No.”

“I did. I couldn’t do it alone, and I didn’t see what I was doing to you—”

“You’re not alone.”

“It’s not the same—none of the squad, not even Fin, can give me what you did.”

“I meant I’m always here if you need to talk to me.”

“No—you left because I—”

“I left because I realized I didn’t know how to do my job without _you_ ,” he said. “That I didn’t know who I _was_ without you. And it was terrifying, because when I thought I might go to prison, I wasn’t thinking about losing the career I’d spent two decades building, I was thinking about you. Only you. How I’d survive without you by my side.”

“You walked away.”

“I was punishing myself,” he admitted. “I didn’t deserve your support. I deserved to hit the bottom you were trying so hard to protect me from.” _So I gave up the sun so I could wallow in the dark_ , he thought.

“We’re both so afraid of needing someone,” she whispered, and his heart stuttered. “Why are we like this?”

“I don’t know,” he said, but that wasn’t true. He knew why, and so did she. They’d both learned hard lessons in their lives, lessons that had started early. “But…” He swallowed past the lump of fear. “But I do need you, Liv. When I’m with you, I feel like myself. Without you, I don’t even know who I am.”

She let out a shaky breath and pulled her arms back. He dropped his to let her go, but she didn’t draw all the way back. She slid her hands to his sides and held his shirt, lifting her head to look at him. Her face was splotchy, her eyes puffy and red. He reached up to pull aside a loose tendril of hair that had stuck to the tears on her cheek.

“I need you, too,” she said. Her chin quivered, and she caught her lower lip with her teeth, shaking her head. “But I’m not the sun, Rafael. I’m not the center of anything. I’m damaged, I know that, and I don’t know if I can get over my fear. If you, loving me, if that… _melted your wings_ , if I took away your confidence in yourself—”

“It was a bad metaphor, Liv,” he cut in. “You didn’t—you _were_ my wings. I just…wanted too much.”

She put a hand to the side of his face, searching his eyes. “What do we do?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I can’t move on,” he admitted. “I tried. All I did was hurt us both, and you’ve already been hurt so much.”

“I can’t let go,” she said. “I tried. And you’ve been hurt, too.”

He hesitated, holding her gaze. He swallowed again. “Maybe…” He licked his lips, nervously. “Maybe we can stop punishing ourselves for all the things that weren’t our fault,” he said. “We’ve made mistakes, but maybe we don’t need to suffer forever. Maybe…between the two of us, we have enough pieces left to make one whole heart,” he suggested.

Her lips curved into a smile. “Words do have power,” she whispered, swiping his damp cheek with the pad of her thumb.

“I love you,” he said. “Please forgive me.”

“You need to forgive yourself,” she answered. She released a breath. “And…I need to forgive myself,” she said, and fresh tears slipped from her eyes. “Can we do this? Are we just setting ourselves up to have our hearts broken again? Because I’m not sure I could survive losing you completely.”

“I want to try,” he said.

“I want to try, too,” she said softly, regarding him. “I want to feel the way I feel when I’m with you. Like there’s…hope.”

He bent his head forward but hesitated, searching her eyes for permission. She tipped her chin up to meet his lips with hers.

_We can do anything, together_ , he thought.

 


End file.
